The Great Gatsby at 100

Let's raise a glass--and a J--to the 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby, the jazz-age classic from F. Scott Fitzgerald that may be the first novel about a drug dealer. 

Fitzgerald had a distant cousin, Mary Surratt, who was hanged in 1865 for conspiring to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. But he was named for his ancestor Francis Scott Key, who wrote the lyrics to “The Star Spangled Banner.” 

Raised in a middle-class family with an alcoholic father in Rochester, NY and St. Paul, MN, he excelled in the Catholic schools he attended and became one of the first Catholics to attend Princeton University.

Apparently, he was a bit of a rebel. The protagonist of his second novel The Beautiful and Damned (1922) has this exchange with a friend:

“Did they ban cigarettes? I see the hand of my holy grandfather.”
“He’s a reformer or something, isn’t he?”
“I blush for him.”

Anthony Patch, who stands in for Fitzgerald in the story, is the grandson of Adam J. Patch, a reformer in the mold of Anthony Comstock (for whom Patch is named). In 1873 Comstock created the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, an institution dedicated to supervising the morality of the public Patch speaks disdainfully of the “shocked and alarmful eyes” of “chroniclers of the mad pace of America.” 

Fitzgerald wrote his third novel,  The Great Gatsby, published on April 10, 1925, while living in Europe and friendly with fellow Lost Generation authors Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and others.  Known to be a serious drinker, in 1929, he contributed to the New Yorker an autobiography of a life spent drinking. Since while he was partying and writing marijuana "reefers" will still legal and available, I wonder if he did more than drink, and if The Great Gatsby reflects this.

The Great Grass-by and Meyer Wolfsheim

Fitzgerald's character Jay Gatsby (with a first name like a "J" and a last name one letter down the alphabet from Fitz) is a man of mysterious wealth by unknown means, who is widely suspected to be a bootlegger. He tells a grandiose and unbelievable life story of inherited wealth to the book's narrator Nick, while taking mysterious phone calls from Chicago and Philadelphia. He later speaks of “a little business on the side…a rather confidential sort of thing,” and offers Nick a piece of the action in exchange for setting up a meeting with Nick’s cousin Daisy. 

After Gatsby sends a servant to mow Nick’s lawn in anticipation of the romantic rendez-vous, Nick tells him, “The grass looks fine.” "What grass?" Gatsby inquired blankly, before saying, "Oh, the grass in the yard." (Where else?)

Gatsby introduces Nick to a character named Meyer Wolfsheim as the man who fixed the 1919 World Series. Wolfsheim wears human teeth as cuff links and fits the physical description of Arnold Rothstein, the real-life gangster who fixed the Series, and was the first international drug smuggler. Wolfsheim asks Nick if he needs a “gonnegtion" and shortly afterwards, Nick hears a group of girls singing “Sheik of Araby” on the street. (Arabs were associated with hashish, and sheiks with mysterious and powerful men.)

Rothstein smoked opium in his youth, and understood its allure. After the Supreme Court ruled in 1921 that the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 forbade doctors from prescribing opiates to addicts, Rothstein applied his international liquor-smuggling expertise to the drugs he knew would be in illicit demand. By the mid-1920s, “he was in sole control of the lucrative black market in heroin, morphine, opium, and cocaine, and had set up a sophisticated system of political payoffs, extortion, and collusion.” (SOURCE: Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, Verso 2004).

The year after The Great Gatsby was published, Rothstein risked exposure by bailing out two employees and became a target of investigation. He was shot in his hotel room at New York’s Park Central Hotel on November 3, 1928 and died the next day. The case was never solved, and Rothstein’s underlings Frank Costello, Meyer Lansky, Charles "Lucky" Luciano and Louis Buchalter divvied up his empire. The U.S. Treasury Department’s investigation into Rothstein’s trafficking and distribution empire “triggered a series of developments that in turn fostered national security and law enforcement policies and practices that endure into the 21st century.”(Valentine)

The Great Gatsby depicts no other drug taking than “finger bowls of champagne” and whiskey (unless perhaps the strange woman who charged exorbitantly for coming to your house and “looking at your feet” was dispensing a drug). Nick’s description of being drunk is, “I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” A dog’s eyes were said to be “looking with blind eyes through the smoke” after Nick goes to the drug store for some cigarettes. At the time, cannabis cigarettes were available at drug stores. 

 

The Last Tycoon

Fitzgerald's last, unfinished novel was the 1937 Hollywood-themed The Last Tycoon. In it, one of the characters calls Hollywood “a mining town in lotus land,” a reference to the Land of the Lotus Eaters from Homer’s The Odyssey, where explorers get lost in a languid, drug-induced stupor. 

The book's main character, producer Monroe Stahr, is thought to be based on MGM wunderkind producer Irving Thalberg, who had turned down a screenplay based on Fitzgerald's novel Tender is the Night. Thalberg ran a smear campaign against author and Democratic socialist Upton Sinclair in the 1934 California gubernatorial election, producing fake newsreels shown in California movie theaters of Sinclair supporters portrayed as bums and criminals, and speaking with foreign accents.^[9]

In The Last Tycoon Stahr takes Benzedrine, alcohol, and an unnamed medicine from a bottle. He first sees his love interest, Englishwoman Kathleen Moore, floating on a studio-made head of Siva, which had become dislodged from a set in an earthquake (pictured in the 1976 film adaptation). To this day, worshipers in India drink bhang (a drink made with cannabis) to celebrate Siva’s birthday. 

When Stahr goes to Kathleen’s door, she says, “I’m sorry I can’t ask you in. Shall I get my reefer and sit outside?” (A reefer is also the name of a sailor’s coat.) When he Kathleen go to his house, where he has had a strip of grass brought in from the prop department, she laughs and asks, “Isn’t that real grass?” Stahr replies, “Oh yes—it’s grass.”

The Unemployed Philosophers Guild

Adaptations of Fitzgerald's Novels

If you're looking to watch a film adaptation of The Great Gatsby, skip the insipid 1970s version with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. I prefer the TV version from 2000, starring Toby Stephens as Gatsby, Mia Sorvino as Daisy, and Paul Rudd as Nick. But my favorite is the 2013 Baz Lurman extravaganza, which captures the party spirit of the times. A musician in Lehrman's Gatsby is unmistakably modeled on Cab Calloway, whose "Are You Hip to the Jive?" was the "Are You Experienced?" of his day. Calloway recorded "Minnie the Moocher" and "Reefer Man," both with cannabis themes.  

 

Under no circumstances should you bother with the 2017 TV version of The Last Tycoon, wherein Kathleen's entrance is as a waitress in a diner. The 1976 movie with Robert DeNiro as Stahr, Jeanne Moreau as the actress, Tony Curtis as the actor, Robert Mitchum as the studio boss, and Jack Nicholson as the union organizer is better.